Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China tried to systematically direct and change human behavior through rational control of who we are and what is good for us.

Dostoevsky’s critique of utopian thinking predicted many of the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is to this imaginary audience that the unnamed narrator of Notes, one of the most astonishing anti-heroes in all literature, lectures: “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway.”īy satirizing the hyper-rationalism and utopian sentiments of his time, the Russian novelist forces us to confront some of the more uncomfortable tendencies of modernity. The progress of enlightenment, they believed, was going to solve the world’s problems once and for all. The Enlightenment with its promise that modern science would conquer nature as well as the notion of the perfection of human nature captured the allegiance of young Russian radicals of the period. What may surprise readers of Notes from Underground, written in 1864, is its sardonic edge and philosophical bite. After being spared from the Tsar’s firing squad at the last minute, years in a Siberian gulag, and a life plagued by epilepsy, he went on to write some of the greatest psychological and existential novels in all of World literature, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. It is perhaps no surprise that Fyodor Dostoevsky is known as one of the greatest psychological writers of all time, given his own dramatic history of suffering. By Stephen Miller and Thomas Johnson, revised by Joe Phelan Introduction

Book notes from the underground